By Global News Service
One of Francophone Africa’s leading anti-colonial activists, Kemi Seba, was arrested in Paris on October 14. Seba is the President of Urgences Panafricanistes (Pan-Africanist Emergencies). The organization has been on the frontlines of the movement across France’s former West African colonies against its continuing monetary stranglehold through the CFA-Franc currency.
Along with the group’s coordinator, Hery Djehuty, Seba was held and interrogated in the basement of France’s Directorate General of Internal Security, which is tasked with counterterrorism and counterespionage. He was released on October 16. The prosecutor’s office said that although no charges were pressed against him, the investigation into possible “foreign interference” in French affairs will continue.
Military codes applicable to spies and high-ranking officials sharing intelligence with a foreign power to promote an attack on France are being invoked against the civilian activist, Seba’s lawyer complained in a press statement while he was still in custody. These charges entail a prison term of 30 years.
Seba is no stranger to French prisons, having served sentences in 2009, 2011, and 2014 for his role in movement organizing. Born in France to Beninese parents, he first came to prominence in the mid-2000s after forming Tribu KA, a Black nationalist organization modeled on the U.S.-based Nation of Islam.
After France banned Tribu KA, accusing it of racism and antisemitism, he reconstituted the organization twice under different names. Both were dissolved by the Interior Ministry, following which he went on to head the New Black Panther Party’s branch in France.
In August 2017, Seba was arrested in Dakar after he publicly burnt a 5,000 CFA franc note, denouncing it as “colonial currency.”
When he was produced in court days later, along with another member who had been arrested with him, Urgences Panafricanistes held demonstrations not only in Dakar but also in city of Cotonou in his home country of Benin, Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, Moursal in Chad, Mali’s capital Bamako, Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou and Niger’s capital Niamey.
Having thus contributed to the growing movement across France’s former colonies in West Africa, he walked free, securing an order from the court for his release on technical grounds.
In February, France—whose Parliament’s chairman of the defense committee in March 2023 had accused Seba of “relaying Russian propaganda”—initiated the proceeding to revoke Seba’s citizenship. A letter notifying him of this action provided his criticism of “French presence in Africa” as “neocolonialism” as reason.
“Your passport is not a bone that you give us or take away depending on how submissive we are to you as if Black people were dogs. I am a free Black man. I am a free African. I am a free Beninese,” Seba declared, after burning his French passport during a live press conference in March, months before the French government completed the process of stripping him of his citizenship in July.
from the Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service
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